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Comeback queen of the courts: Volleyball star who nearly lost her arm in crash shows the way for her peers

Shacarra Orr, centre, with her sister Ciara, left, and her best friend Freddie Campbell, who was inspired to pursue volleyball at university by Shacarra's comeback from almost losing her lower arm.

Photograph by: Submitted

On the afternoon of Oct. 1, 2011, a Grade 10 girl from the tiny B.C. town of Jaffray was being wheeled with purpose through the halls of Calgary’s Alberta Children’s Hospital by a team of trauma specialists.

Her right arm, the one she used to send bullet serves all over the volleyball court, had for all intents and purposes been severed in a horrific car crash earlier that day just outside of Sparwood.

Pulled from the mangled frame of her father’s pickup truck, then carried up a steep embankment, she had eventually been flown across the Rockies by medical helicopter. Now, tests were needed to determine the full extent of the damage.

It had been the most hellish of journeys but, at that very moment, the teenager was conscious and had somehow been able to determine that one of her nurses was turning a year older that day.

The gurney came to a stop and, in the middle of the scariest day of her young life, everyone broke out in song.

HANGING BY A THREAD

That Saturday morning, Bruce Orr was driving his eldest daughter Shacarra, 17, and her teammate Terryn Penner from Jaffray to Sparwood for a junior girls’ volleyball tournament.

Just less than an hour into the drive, about 20 minutes outside of Sparwood, an approaching vehicle veered into oncoming traffic and headed straight toward the Orrs’ truck.

“When I looked at that car coming at us, I knew we were all dying,” Bruce Orr recalls of the crash that sent his truck down a steep embankment and into a shallow creek.

“When we hit, I don’t know if it was the hood or the airbags, but I could feel us bouncing off something. Then the second time we hit something big, I thought, ‘We may live through this.’”

Miraculously, everyone survived.

Bruce sustained a ruptured spleen and later had 35 stitches to close a gash he sustained in the elbow he used to smash out the driver’s side window in an attempt to get out of the car and get the two girls to safety.

Penner, sitting in the back seat, was also seriously injured, having suffered extensive damage to her right arm and hand, as well as cuts to her face. Shacarra? Her leg was broken, her liver was lacerated and her lower right arm had been almost completely severed from her upper arm.

“My subconscious told me not to look,” says Shacarra. “But I now know that there was about an inch of skin holding it together at the elbow.”

SOUL SURVIVOR

Ask its residents for the population of Jaffray and the first thing they’ll say in response is: “Summer or winter?”

It’s a lake town that draws many tourists in the warmer months, but then shrinks to about 500 people the rest of the year.

“We live on a farm,” says Shacarra of the idyllic home she has shared with her dad, mom Lori, older brother Bryton and younger sister Ciara. “There’s 21 acres and a creek running right through the property.”

Shacarra started in gymnastics at a young age, later started playing soccer and, throughout a high school career that ends later this month with her commencement ceremonies, has tried her hand at all manner of sports. Yet volleyball, and its quarterbacking position of setter, was the one that captured her heart.

Interestingly enough, just before the accident, she and her family had watched the motion picture Soul Surfer, in which young surfing star Bethany Hamilton loses her arm in a shark attack while out on the water.

“I watched it two days before,” remembers Shacarra. “Right after the accident I asked someone, ‘Will I be able to keep my arm?’ and they said, ‘We can’t promise that.’

“Just as we were going into the ambulance after the crash, that’s what I was thinking, about archers at the Paralympics and Soul Surfer, and how people are living with one arm.”

BEATING THE ODDS

Today, more than two-and-half years after the accident, Shacarra Orr is the living embodiment of positivity.

“It’s a Hollywood story in a way,” Chris Jenkins, a local volleyball coach and family friend of the Orrs, says of the aura around Shacarra that she brings to the lives of others.

“She just carries that world with her. It’s a universe that seems to exist around her.”

The outpouring of support was incredible during her two-week hospital stay in Alberta.

“Calgary is four hours from home,” says mom Lori. “But through it all we had 131 visitors — from friends to teachers to parents.”

Doctors gave Shacarra little hope of being able to use her right arm in any kind of meaningful way. But after she attacked her rehabilitation with the same gusto she normally reserved for the volleyball court, things began to change.

Fortunately, enough nerve tissue in the arm remained intact to allow regeneration. That, coupled with Shacarra’s determination, allowed her to regain some of her mobility.

“I am way past where they expected,” she says of the arm, which several weeks after the accident began to twitch while the family watched TV.

“They never thought I would be able to move my wrist and fingers. But I kept positive and then my wrist began to flicker.”

Perhaps most amazing of all, after graduating from the K-to-10 Jaffray School and moving on to senior high for Grades 11 and 12 at nearby Fernie Secondary, she made a return to the court and earned a spot on her new school’s senior volleyball team.

Although she was played sparingly, she remained undaunted, using the time not only to reinvent the way she would set the ball to compensate for a right arm with limited mobility, but to learn how to both serve and attack the ball with her left arm.

Her efforts came to fruition in the summer after her Grade 11 year when the East Kootenay club team she was playing for advanced to the national championships in Edmonton.

One day at the tournament, her team’s starting setter took ill, ­forcing Shacarra into a full-time role.

Not only did she shine but, on that day, members of Canada’s Paralympic sitting volleyball team happened to be in attendance. After they learned of Shacarra’s story she was soon invited to tryouts and today is a member of the senior national team that is aiming for the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro.

“I am so thankful for that day,” she says. “And it’s because I was positive. I think many would have quit, but I went out there and I played with my opposite hand.

“I am the baby on the (sitting) team,” adds Orr, who will enrol at the University of Calgary in the fall, putting her in the same city where the team trains. “Before my accident, I always wanted to play for the U of C volleyball team. But now I have found something even bigger than university volleyball.”

SONG FOR SEPTEMBER

You can’t come away from a day like the one Shacarra Orr endured back in 2011 and not be forever changed.

Upon her return to school, she stood in front of the entire student body at Jaffray and told her story, something she has subsequently done at another area high school.

“I got them to close their eyes and we relived the day,” she says. “I felt like some of them needed to hear it, too, because they were affected emotionally by it. We all cried. But I felt at peace and it showed they loved me.”

Then, just this past November, Shacarra, at the behest of her ­Cranbrook-based physician, Dr. Bob Cutler, accompanied him on an outreach trip to Haiti, where she helped give hope to the underprivileged.

“I tried to leave them with the thought that if we are positive, we can get through things, and that there is a plan for all of us on this Earth,” Shacarra says.

Still, she doesn’t deny that there are tough days.

“I have times on the court where I just want to be the old me, the one that had one of the hardest serves in this area,” she says.

“But I have to look forward. If I could go back and not have it happen, I wouldn’t. I had to find a new part of me. This might sound a little corny, but I’ve been on this self-finding journey. I have found that I have really strong people skills, and I’ve been told I am an inspiration.”

So much so that her best friend, fellow volleyball player Freddie Campbell of Kimberley’s Selkirk Secondary, who is hoping to begin her university volleyball career in North Dakota, attributes her success to the example set by Shacarra.

“Such a big reason I am moving on to play university volleyball is because of her strength,” Freddie says, crying. “She doesn’t have the full ability that everyone else has, but she is super strong and she has just persevered through everything.”

To the point where that wrist and those fingers, the ones that weren’t supposed to be able to move again, are putting themselves to good use in one of her high school classes.

“I’m playing guitar now,” she says with a laugh. “But I’m not very good.”

Come Sept. 9, she might decide to pull it out and do a little finger-picking. That’s the day she turns 18. And her rendition of “Happy Birthday” will never have sounded so sweet.

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